Rituaalid organisatsioonikultuuris väärtuste edastajate ja identiteedi kujundajatena Hansapanga näitel
Rituals in organizational culture as ways of communicating values and modelling identity: the case of Hansapank

Summary/Abstract: Rituals as cultural performances are communicative processes with certain typical characteristics (structuredness, collectivity, symbolicism, repetitiveness, transformability and spatio-temporal boundaries) that reveal the values as well as aspects of identity that properly belong to a more abstract level in organizational culture. In our paper we first present a cursory overview of contemporary culture-centred approaches to studying organizations that foreground concepts such as values, identity and rituals, and then proceed to apply these theoretical positions to a specific case study — the rituals practiced in Hansapank, primarily initiation rituals, that partake in mediating the values and modelling the identity of this organization. The research is based on ten semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted in 2005 with Hansapank’s employees in different positions. Primarily, we focused on recently employed tellers, who in their replies reflect upon the initiation ritual they have had to go through. As a result of our analysis, we conclude that in Hansapank, the initiation ritual of tellers has the most distinct characteristics of a ritual as a cultural performance, and is connected with the three main phases of transition rites (separation, transition, incorporation) described in social anthropology. The descriptions of rituals and organizational culture revealed that for the employees, the lived and the declared levels of Hansapank’s identity as an organization, and the bank’s image are closely intertwined. Studying the employment process of tellers revealed that their initiation is considered highly important, since the position of a teller is peculiar to the organizational culture of banking (closely associated with the organization’s identity), and it is through the tellers that the bank communicates most directly and extensively with the world outside the organization, where it is essential to impart the principal values and identity of the organization and to fashion a beneficial image.

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